Build a Rover-Style Marketplace in Minutes Using Prometora

Intro (0:00)

Hey guys, in this video I'll take you through how easy it is to build a Rover-style marketplace using Prometora. Let's do it.

Setting up the initial pages (0:08)

Okay, but first let's actually have a look at rover.com. You can see they have multiple services, but the one we're going to be making today is just the dog-walking feature. You can always evolve your marketplace from there, of course. So basically you have people who are willing to take other people's dogs for walks, and dog owners on the other side. Let's do it.

I'm in Prometora. I'm prompting my initial pages. I'm actually just going to call it Rover — "a marketplace for dog owners and people willing to take dogs for walks." Cool. Actually, let's not call it Rover. Let's call it Dog Walkers, something like that. And we're going to go for a fun and playful design. Everything can be adjusted afterwards anyway, right? So right now it's just crafting the first three pages: the front page, contact, and about.

Okay, you can already see up here it doesn't look that great. Let's remove the tagline. I save that. Let me add a logo. And let's make the logo a little bit bigger — like that. Save it. It's a little bit hard to read. Right. And actually I also want to show the name there: "Dog Walkers." "Dogs Walkers." Maybe just "Dogs." I don't know — Dogs for now. Cool.

So here you can see the first initial front page. Let's also see the about page — looks like this. Nice. And the contact page is simple like this right now. That is pretty good already. All of this can be changed easily. On the front page, I'm not a big fan of this part — let's just delete it, and publish. Pretty good.

Adjusting the listing form (2:09)

Now let me go to the store settings and adjust the listing form. The listing form is always super important because that's where you define what to ask for when someone is making a listing. Let's just call it "Listing" for now — that's fine. The ones who'll be listing are the people offering their service to take a dog for a walk. That could be anyone who would like a part-time job sometimes. Pretty simple.

What are we asking for? Title, description, price. The compare-at price — we can delete that. Category, tax — we don't need that. Stock, SKU — no. Let's use US dollars. Image required — that would be an image of the person, I guess. Let's say it's required, and one image is the minimum. We enable messaging between the buyer and the seller — that's good, so they can just message each other and figure it out. One thing we also need is location, so the dog owner knows where the person offering their service is based. That is very important. Let's leave it like this for now. Save.

Making the first listing (3:40)

Let's go and have a look. Up here it's not looking great right now, but let me log in. I create an account — I am a seller, I add my name, a password, and create the account. Cool. Now if I go to create a listing, you can see the listing process. I can add my title, description, price, and the location. Let's try and make one. "I am great at taking care of dogs," something like that. "Hi, I am Peter. I am great at taking care of dogs." Cool. Price is $10. I add an image — I have one here that is AI-generated, as you can probably see. And let me add an address — I'm just going to add something here. Then I add the listing. It's now in draft, so let me publish it immediately.

Cool — first listing is there. Now if I go to the marketplace I can't actually see the all-listings page in the nav yet, but we can adjust that. I go back to the marketplace, into Site Settings, into Navigation, and add at least the all-listings page. Save. Now I can see the all-listings page. I click here, and we can see the listings — the first listing is there. If I click on it, it looks like this. Maybe it's a little zoomed in. I can click here and see the image. Image isn't the best, to be honest, but you get the point.

Adjusting the product detail page (5:29)

I notice I can't see the calendar — we need to adjust that. Let's go back into store settings. That's actually on the product detail page. We have to enable the calendar here — and "Show location on map," not the availability calendar. Show the exact location. That's how it is. And here we untick these because we don't need to show the compare-at price. Let's see what it looks like. We can also enable the seller profile page. Save. Go back, click on the all-listings page, click on the listing — and now I can see where the seller is located. "Sold by Rasmus." You can see up here the location is in Oslo right now. I can buy now.

Actually, maybe we don't need a Buy Now button — we'll only enable messaging to begin with. That might make sense. If I click on Rasmus, the seller profile looks very simple right now because I (the seller) didn't add anything. But I can add my profile picture and an image up here if I wanted. Cool. Already now it looks relatively good.

Let's remove the Buy Now option. I go to the Payments area and disable payments to begin with. Also let me untoggle this one — Return Policy, we don't need that right now. Comments — we could enable comments, that could be cool, but let's not. Related Products — only if we have some. Wishlist, quantity selector — we don't need those. So we just have the title, price, description, and the location. Enable zoom on hover — that didn't look great here, so let's not have that.

Let's see what it looks like now. I go back into the listing — Buy Now is gone. The image is still not great, but it's better. Now I can message the seller. Well, actually I can't, because I am the seller. But if I were another user with another account, I could message this seller.

Cool — this is a pretty good first draft. Already we're pretty much there for a first MVP. Sometimes it's totally fine to go live with a marketplace that doesn't have transactions to begin with — no payments, just messaging. Totally fine.

Changing the design (8:19)

Now let's just try and make the marketplace a little bit nicer. That can take some time depending on what you like and how you want it. Actually, I just noticed: "Paw Stride" is a pretty cool name. Maybe we call it that instead. Let's make that change. Now you can see it's called Paw Stride up there. This logo was a little wide — let's change that. 200 pixels, height stays the same. Layout: flex center. Like this. Now it's definitely smaller — might actually be too small now, but you get what I'm trying to do.

Do we need these? Yeah, let's keep them. And let's also keep those — that is good. The contact page is pretty good as it is. The about page — let's also keep that for now. Of course, I could add any other page I'd want to.

Let's keep it like this for now. Here's how it looks on mobile — not great, but not bad either. Editing always takes time, but the button here is much smaller now. This one could also be the same version as the other one. Pretty good. If I go to the contact page, looks like this. Pretty good. The all-listings page has that one listing. If I click it, it looks like this on mobile — and like this on desktop. I can message, see the location, click on the seller. The seller profile looks like this right now.

As you can see, that took less than 10 minutes. We already have a first MVP of a Rover-style marketplace, currently called Paw Stride. That's basically how easy it is to build on Prometora.

Outro (10:32)

So that's it for this one, guys. I hope you liked it. Always reach out if you have any questions, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. See you. Bye-bye.